Susan "Spark" Park

I invented the 5A Framework for GTM to easily communicate a nd keep track the top objectives of a Go-To-Market plan.  Audience: You must understand your target(s), and how it will be best to approach them.  Angle: What is your message/angle. This will tell your audience(s) how you solve a problem. Accomplishments: Your goals and milestones Activate: How will you execute your plan?  Assess: Evaluate and adjust If your GTM has all of these five elements you have a solid overview of what your GTM w ...Read More

Accomplishments or goals: This is a critical A (please refer to Spark's 5A Framework or other answers) that can be very hard to figure out, but it's worth the time to build them.  I like to think of KPIs in two buckets:  1. New/nascent products need to drive Retention. Set up your Acccomplishments to focus on retention, and after you have that - you can push growth and start heavily investing in marketing to drive growth. If you aren't retaining customers, then there is no need to focus on anyth ...Read More

I built the 5A Framework of GTM for this question. :-) I know where you're coming from. You're proud of your incredibly, detailed GTM, but you need to present this plan to your GTM team, and you're in a sea of product documents and spreadhseets and you're unsure of what points to bring up. Create 5 sections with each of these A's, and you'll be surprised how holistic the GTM story is, and the quality feedback you will get back to pivot the GTM if need it. This is why Audience: You must understan ...Read More

I have started to ask "What is the biggest trade-off decision you had to make?"  Most people go straight to themselves and a trade-off that they've had to make about a job or career path, not a company decision. One interviewee floored me when he talked about hard decisions on needing to lay-off members of his team, but then described how he worked through his network to get every person on that team a job at another company. Not only did he show he could make tough calls, but he was trying to b ...Read More

Instead of a "vertical focus" go forward with a New Audience focus so you can leverage the 5A GTM framework , and ensure you're thinking through a consumers' need.  Also, if you focus on a new user, you can also employ the "Job to be done" framework, which can help narrow what the customer really wants to get done and how your product can satiate that need. After you establish those jobs (UXR) you can use market research and even analytics to scale out the size of these jobs and what could bring ...Read More

We're going to need to shift from a meeting-first GTM strategy to webinar-first and content marketing strategies in B2B. Consumer GTM will need to remove an events, tentpoles, etc as well, but I see more of the B2B space being affected by the lack of facetime with their clients. We've already been evangelizing a more scaled approach to our marketing as Gaming has grown in prominence and more and more indie developers and markets are growing, but this will be more and more critical. I think conte ...Read More

Absolutely.   Audience: Understand your target(s) Angle: Tell your audience(s) how you solve a problem Accomplishments: Have goals and milestones Activate: How to execute your plan Assess: Evaluate and adjust Most of all empower your XFN team to ensure you have the tactics spelled out, especially in the Angle and Activate sections. (Naming, positioning, core messaging etc). Bring in experts for each A and they will help ensure you have your tactics covered for the launch you would like to comple ...Read More

Expected: Working with multiple timezones Language barriers/poor translations Cultural issues Getting individuals to focus on the team dynamics so we can work as a global unit Countries/regional teams coming up with their own narratives and strategies. Unexpected Distributing the work so each person on your team can shine with a strong project to drive visibility, especially if they're not inherent good ways of working in the region.   Memes are incredibly quick to spring up and hard to squash. ...Read More

I love this question. Instead of trying to convince them, I would listen to their concerns and try to alter the product to make it relevant, especially if the market has a strong track record of being right. If you can’t make the feature requirements in time to do so, cut the market from the launch. There’s no need to enter a market (translation resourcing, training etc) if you don't have stakeholder buy-in. You will have more time to focus on other markets with more opportunity. Also, nothing w ...Read More